A radio communication system is capable of providing radio services such as voice and data. A common radio communication system is a multiple access wireless system, where a base station transmits data and/or control information to a user equipment UE (User Equipment) over a downlink, and receives data and/or control information of the user equipment over an uplink. Similarly, the user equipment transmits data and/or control information to the base station over the uplink, and receives data and/or control information transmitted by the base station over the downlink. The following takes an LTE (Long Term Evolution) and/or LTE-A (LTE-Advanced) radio communication system as an example for description.
In order to satisfy performance requirements for or to improve performance of LTE-A, different types or different modes of base stations, for example, a low-transmit-power base station (BS: Base Station) or transmit/receive node, a Micro BS (micro base station), a Pico BS (pico base station), a Home BS (home base station), a femto BS (femto base station), a Relay BS (relay base station), and an RRH (Remote radio head, remote radio head), may be deployed in a homogeneous network (homogeneous network), so as to enhance the coverage and performance of the network. Such a network structure is referred to as a heterogeneous network (Heterogeneous network). The following further describes an example of a heterogeneous network where a high-transmit-power base station (for example, a macro base station, or referred to as a Macro eNodeB or a MeNB) and a low-transmit-power base station (low power base station for short, lower power node, LPN) are deployed.
In order to improve frequency spectrum utilization efficiency for a system, full or partial frequency spectrum reuse is performed on uplink and/or downlink spectrum resources configurable for an LPN and uplink and/or downlink spectrum resources configurable for a MeNB. In this case, because the LPN is configured with the same or partially same spectrum resources as the MeNB, intra-channel or intra-frequency interference occurs on downlink channel or uplink channel transmission between the LPN (or a UE served by the LPN) and the MeNB (or a UE served by the MeNB). This interference affects reliability of downlink channel transmission and uplink channel detection of the LPN and the MeNB, where the channel includes a control channel and a data channel.
At present, in the LTE-A standard, a time division multiplexing TDM (TDM: Time Division Multiplexing) inter-cell interference coordination ICIC (Inter Cell Interference Coordination) method is employed to process inter-cell interference in a heterogeneous network scenario. An interfering cell base station (which may be a macro base station or an LPN base station) sets some specific channel resources to low transmit powers or sets them to transmit no service (that is, zero service transmit power). An example of such a specific channel resource is an almost blank subframe (ABS: Almost Blank subframe) resource. An affected cell base station (which may be an LPN base station or a macro base station) schedules a UE that receives strong interference from the interfering cell base station on a subframe corresponding to the ABS subframe configured by the interfering cell base station for service transmission, thereby ensuring transmission performance of the affected UE of the affected base station.
If transmit powers on the ABS subframe are not coordinated between the interfering cell base station and the affected cell base station, when the interfering cell base station sets a transmit power on the ABS subframe to be very low, it is possible that almost no UE can be scheduled by the interfering cell base station to perform service transmission on the ABS subframe, which reduces available transmission resources. In another aspect, if the interfering cell base station schedules the ABS subframe for a UE thereof to increase transmission resources, it is possible that a UE of the affected cell base station still receives strong interference because the transmit power on the ABS subframe is set improperly.